A Table-to-Farm Pioneer

In the 22 years since Kurt Timmermeister bought four acres of rocky, suspect farmland here for $100,000, he has had his ribs broken by an amorous female cow, lost a lamb to a crow that pecked its eyes out, and recoiled from the cannibalism of his chickens (when they weren’t eating one another, they were picked off by raccoons), among other blood- and mud-flecked dramas.

He has learned that polar fleece is a terrible material to wear while working with bees (their feet get tangled in the hooked fabric, causing them to alert their hive mates, who will then divebomb the wearer). And he has also learned that the raw-milk market is a roiling tangle of regulation and zealotry, and the economics of the farmers’ market don’t add up for small growers of commodity crops like beans and carrots.

Yet Mr. Timmermeister, a 51-year-old recovering restaurateur who arrived on this island without knowing how to operate a car, is now a truck- and tractor-driving dairy farmer and cheese maker. He can shoot a pig, butcher it and make his own bacon.

And finally, after two decades of experimentation and grindingly hard work, his farm, which has grown to nearly 13 acres, is solvent, if not wildly profitable. (He credits this to sales of a Camembert-style blooming rind cheese named for his first cow, a soulful Jersey called Dinah, which is aged in a Hobbit-ish cave in the side of a hill.)

This farming coming-of-age story is both a cautionary tale and an inspiration to those who aspire to the farm life. His hard-won lessons — how he learned what he and his land had an affinity for (cows, not sheep) and how to profit from that (sell cheese, not vegetables) — were the subject of his first book, “Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land,” out in 2011. It distinguished itself from the multitude of farm memoirs with titles like “Barnheart” and “The Dirty Life” with its scope and vantage point.

Mr. Timmermeister, a sometimes tetchy but always passionate, detail-driven narrator, is now a seasoned professional. And while his first years of farming were colored by his own romantic notions about small-scale agriculture, his prose is never breathless. His new book, “Growing a Feast: The Chronicle of a Farm-to-Table Meal,” out next week from Norton, is the two-year back story of a single meal, an elaborate Sunday dinner for 20 (one of many he used to hold on the farm) that begins with the birth of a calf.

In 1991, when he bought the land, he wasn’t looking to become a farmer. At the time, Mr. Timmermeister, who trained to be a pastry cook while studying international affairs at the American University of Paris, had a small, thriving cafe in downtown Seattle.

But he knew that he did not want to be the guy who was still living in his studio apartment at 40 because he had squandered his profits partying into the night with his restaurant buddies. He also wanted a break from the city, and although he had never learned to drive, he chose Vashon Island, a rural community of 10,000 that was a two-hour round-trip commute, with a ferry ride, to his business.

The only property he could afford there was a four-acre thicket covered in rocks, agricultural debris and wild blackberries. Buried under all of that was a chicken coop someone had fitted out as human living quarters, along with an above-ground swimming pool and a rotting, rodent- and-insect-infested log cabin built in the 1880s.

A friend showed him how to dispose of the moldy wallboard, shag carpet and insulation he pulled out of his new house (the chicken coop) by dousing the rank, sodden pile in gasoline and burning it in one huge toxic bonfire. And even then, he said, “I thought it was really glamorous.”

It took a decade to restore the log cabin, which turned out to be one of the oldest surviving pioneer log houses on the island, possibly built by an itinerant carpenter. Planted on the property line, it was slowly sinking into the soil and “probably should have been bulldozed,” said Mr. Timmermeister, who moved it to the center of the lot and onto a concrete foundation. Much of its timber had to be replaced; the new lumber was milled on the property, worked over with an adze and left outside to cure for a year.

Along the way, the house earned landmark status and a $25,000 grant from the county. Mr. Timmermeister estimated that he has spent 10 times that on its restoration, which is why it took so long. “I would run out of money and have to stop,” he said.

Though it has no kitchen or bathroom, it is a remarkably elegant structure, a log cabin with airs. Its ceilings are high and its center staircase wide, and flanking the front door are grand, eight-paned single-hung windows (single-hung means the bottom window doesn’t open).

On the back porch, there is a bathtub with a view; under the stairs, a room for a toilet and sink, but no tank. (Mr. Timmermeister rigged one above the door outside.)

The house is sparsely furnished with beautiful, curious objects: an optometrist’s handmade desk, lamps made from taxidermied deer hooves, artwork by friends. On a Biedermeier table, a copy of Progressive Dairyman.

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Kurt Timmermeister, a restaurateur turned dairy farmer, restored a log cabin on his land over a 10-year period. The maple for the dining table, top, was milled on the property.CreditAaron Leitz for The New York Times

“I don’t need a lot of stuff,” said Mr. Timmermeister, who estimated that he clears about $24,000 a year. His boots are mud-spattered, but his house is clean and spartan. Outside, his raised planting beds are poured concrete, a tidy grid of rectangles more Donald Judd than funky farmer. The cow barn, fastened with pegs instead of nails, looks like a Shaker meeting house. (But his 1990 Toyota pickup, he assured a visitor, is a mess, matted with dog hair, parking tickets and farm receipts, its windows sticky with dog nose: “I promise, it’s disgusting.”)

As Mr. Timmermeister learned to clear and work his land, hoping, at first, just to grow a few vegetables, he kept his restaurant in the city, shuttling home at night to his tiny chicken coop and its wood-burning stove. In 1994, he traded his cafe for a larger establishment with 120 seats, 25 employees and about $1.5 million in annual sales.

That shift was a game-changer, he said. Its scale required cooking a tremendous amount of food, industrial-agribusiness products like Cryovac-ed pork loins and cases of pale, slippery chicken breasts. That process, cooking slick and slimy proteins, so revolted Mr. Timmermeister that he found himself unable to eat in his own restaurant. He vowed to not only grow his own food, but make a profit from it.

Paradoxically, it was the restaurant that financed the farm while he found his feet. In 2004, he sold the restaurant, which meant for the next five years, he didn’t have to make any money from the farm. The restaurant was sold on contract, and his netted a $4,000 monthly check.

“It was an incredibly soft landing,” he said. “I could pay all my bills and experiment. I tried vegetables and apple cider and honey.”

He moved quickly from sheep, which he disliked, to pigs and dairy cows. His two seasons selling at the farmers’ market cost him $17,500. He spent a few years selling raw milk, until all the regulations and the worry about sickening a customer wore him out.

Finally, he learned to make cheese, and built an impressive cave to age his product, excavating a hill and implanting it with a concrete barrel-vaulted bunker fitted with two beautifully carved doors made by a neighbor.

As the cheese business was growing, he began hosting Sunday dinners, extravagant four-hour, eight-course meals that he and various Seattle chefs cooked using ingredients produced on his land, which he named Kurtwood Farms (Mr. Timmermeister named the farm the year he tried the farmers’ market; he hoped the plural “farms” would give a gloss to his produce.)

These dinners, made and served in the concrete cookhouse he built on the footprint of his old chicken coop, quickly acquired a cult following. Foodies fell all over themselves to snag a seat. Even at $100 a head, they were so oversubscribed that Mr. Timmermeister started asking would-be diners to answer essay questions, in an attempt to winnow down their numbers.

“I got a lot of hate mail,” he said. “But some rose to the challenge. Of course, I didn’t realize how much work it would be to read 200 essays about corn on the cob and then prioritize them. Even then, I had to tell people, ‘You spent an hour writing and I still don’t have a seat for you.’ ”

The dinners ended three years ago. Now he concentrates on writing and cheese making, selling 400 Dinah’s Cheeses a week to more than 30 restaurants and 30 stores. (He makes the deliveries himself, on Mondays and Wednesdays.) “I’m wildly proud of its success,” he said. The farm has seven employees, and romance has blossomed: Kelsey Kozak, 24, is engaged to Benjamin Scott-Killian, 26.

On a recent stormy Thursday, Mr. Timmermeister served a visitor tomato soup and macaroni-and-cheese in the cookhouse, its windows steamed up from the pot of pork stock simmering on the stove. Ms. Kozak, on a break from cheese making, wandered in to ask Mr. Timmermeister if he could spare a calf for her wedding. “As a flower girl,” Ms. Kozak said.

The rain was coming down in sheets and Mr. Timmermeister handed a visitor a broken umbrella he extracted from the debris in his truck. Bareheaded, he led a squelchy tour through the mud: into the “make room,” where the cheeses are created; past the cow barn, where the cows stood in the rain with their doleful stares; into the tangy funk of the cheese cave; and then back into the warm cookhouse again.

These days, Mr. Timmermeister said, he does more managing and cheese selling than farming. And he takes only two of the 14 milking shifts; squatting under a cow to attach the milking device makes his knees ache.

He also avoids the tractor, because his depth perception is shot. A detached retina he suffered from the flick of a cow’s tail never properly healed, and not being able to gauge the distance between the tractor’s front bucket and anything else means he has crashed into the barn too many times.

Still, he considers himself a lucky guy, privileged, he said, with “a grand life that many envy.”

There’s just one thing: Farm work and island living have been a barrier to romance. Not to sound ungrateful, he added, but the single part is getting old.